In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

48 S C H A P T E R 6 Last Days at Warner’s After Platinum Blonde, Man’s Castle, and Midnight Mary, which together required her to play three different types of women at two other studios, Loretta felt more secure about her art. The reviews bolstered her confidence , and she knew it was only a matter of time before she would be moving on. But where? In November 1932, Jesse Lasky announced his intention to become an independent producer at the Fox Film Corporation, with Zoo in Budapest and Berkeley Square as his first productions. Loretta was well aware of Famous Players-Lasky, the studio resulting from the Famous PlayersLasky Feature Plays merger in 1916, with Adolph Zukor as president, and Lasky as vice president for production. It was there that Loretta’s film career was launched in 1917. The company underwent various name changes, the most significant being the addition of “Paramount” in 1927. Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky was not the corporate name for long. Zukor was obsessed with creating a vertically integrated empire , with its own theatre chain, Publix. To prevent friction between the studio and its theater circuit, Lasky stepped aside. The new name was Paramount-Publix, eventually becoming just plain Paramount. Lasky wanted Loretta for his first independent film, Zoo in Budapest (1933), with Gene Raymond as her costar. Raymond gave a bravura performance as Zanni, an animal trainer orphaned at an early age and raised by the director of the Budapest Zoo, where he grew into a combination of noble savage and animal activist, stealing fur stoles and burning them. Loretta also played an orphan, Eve, who is not as fortunate as Zanni. Eve lives in an orphanage, where a holiday is a trip to the zoo, and a chaperone or “keeper” is dependent on a guidebook to describe the attractions. Zanni locks eyes with Eve, beckoning to her to come with him. Another L A S T D AY S AT WA R N E R ’ S 49 orphan, eager to cooperate, diverts the group’s attention by diving into a lake, making it possible for Eve to escape and join Zanni’s world, where humans bond with animals. For those who only know Raymond as Jeanette MacDonald’s husband , his Zanni is a revelation. It is a strikingly athletic performance, requiring Raymond to jump over partitions, and in the terrifying climax, to hop on the back of an elephant with a young boy he has rescued. He must then grab on to a rope to hoist the boy and himself to safety—but not before a tiger leaps up and takes a piece out of Zanni’s leg. Regardless , Zanni survives, his gait no less springy, and both he and Eve are rewarded by the boy’s father, who makes it possible for Eve to leave the orphanage, marry Zani, and live in a cottage on his estate. In the last scene—which is more like the finale of an operetta—the couple arrives at their new home, radiantly happy and unperturbed about the future. Loretta had relatively little to do in the film. The real stars were Raymond and director Rowland V. Lee, who kept a fragile script from splintering . Raymond fancied himself the successor to Douglas Fairbanks; however, it was Errol Flynn and then Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who buckled the swash and wielded a mean rapier. Still, Raymond’s performance was admirable. He did not need a double; like Burt Lancaster, he did his own climbing and swinging, in addition to exuding the kind of machismo that won over audiences. Raymond was probably one of the leading men Loretta developed a crush on, not knowing at the time that he was bisexual, more homosexually than heterosexually inclined. In fact, when he married Jeanette MacDonald in 1937, she was still in love with Nelson Eddy, her first and only love. Raymond’s lover at the time was Mary Pickford’s husband, Buddy Rogers. On their honeymoon cruise to Hawaii, Jeanette and Raymond had a cabin next to Rogers and Pickford, then an incurable alcoholic: “There was a honeymoon going on—but the ones sleeping together were Gene Raymond and Buddy Rogers.” But at the time Zoo in Budapest was filmed, Raymond had not met MacDonald, and only a few kindred spirits knew his sexual preferences. As for Loretta , the crush ended when the shoot was over, and then it was on to another leading man and another crush. Except...

Share